By Andreas Scherer, PhD, Founder and CEO, Salto Partners
Precision medicine no longer has a science problem. The evidence is in, sequencing is affordable, and clinical relevance is clear. What limits impact now is scale. National genome programs are how countries close that gap, and they are best understood as infrastructure investments rather than research projects.
The core argument
- Reference data has to match the population. A variant that looks rare or pathogenic in one population can be benign in another. Without population-specific data, labs over-call, under-call and send patients into unnecessary follow-up.
- Scale reveals what small studies cannot. Linking genomic data to longitudinal health records exposes patterns in cancer risk, rare disease and drug response that are invisible in single-site cohorts.
- Standardization is the point. At national level, precision medicine means consistent, guideline-driven care regardless of where a patient enters the system.
- Shared infrastructure beats duplication. When every hospital builds its own interpretation framework, cost multiplies and quality varies. Shared, continuously improved knowledge is what moves genomics from pilot to policy.
What it means for leaders
For health systems and ministries, sequencing contracts are the easy part. Interpretation, governance, data sovereignty and licensing need to be designed into the program from day one, not bolted on after the first samples arrive.
For companies and investors, the buyer is changing. National programs procure differently from individual labs: longer cycles, formal tenders, strict security requirements (often fully air-gapped), and an expectation of system-wide pricing rather than per-site licenses. Winning there takes a different go-to-market, a different partner strategy and regulatory credibility that holds up under scrutiny.
Read the full perspective: National Genome Projects Are Foundational to Precision Medicine at Scale, published in GenomeWeb.
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